As for where it comes from, I remember when I got my first IT position. Working Tech Support for an ISP back in the late 90's. I was 17 years old, and I remember having a conversation with a few of the other guys regarding this exact subject. One of them went on to explain, how it is only natural that we would all gain a bit of arrogance. Think about it.... most of us are still in High School, yet we have everyone from House Wives to C.E.O's calling us to help with their computers. On top of that, for the previous decade before that we've had family members and friends calling us for help when their computers break, because we were that kid who is "good with computers". As a snot nosed 17 year old brat, this naturally induces a bit of arrogance.

As for how to get over it, mostly it will come with time. Most of us learn, eventually, that there is always someone out there smarter than us.

I use openvpn to allow me to to exactly what you're describing. My connection home network is NAT'd, but from work or anywhere else that I have my laptop, I can ssh directly to any machine on my home network. I only need to make my openvpn connection. It works really well. I'd be willing to bet you could get an openvpn client for your phone and make set it to always connect. Then you'd be able to get to your phone from anywhere also.

The company I work for is always looking for that magic bullet. Some 3rd party software that will solve all of our problems. I keep trying to explain that what we need is good flexible software that will solve some/most of our problems. If we choose the right software, we can then write our own code to pick up the slack of the 3rd party software. Hopefully we can also write some code to integrate software A with software B.

But no matter how hard we search, no company has written software that will solve all of our problems.

I started composting a few years ago at home, and was blown away at how fast it actually happens. If your starting a "fresh batch", it can take about a month before it starts to really look look like soil, but after that, anything you add is unidentifiable within a few days to 2 weeks depending on what it is.

I'm sure times vary, but still, I was expecting it to take months for an old apple to break down. By the end of the year, my 3 member family has a 55 gallon trash can filled with usable compost.

I think the idea is that if you extrapolate the "closed system" idea out to it's logical conclusion, you come to the idea that the Universe itself is a closed system. Thus the idea that that the Big Bang sent matter shooting off into the far reaches of space only to later form itself into galaxies, stars, and planets goes against the second law. Taking this all the way down in the opposite direction to amino acids and proteins aligning themselves in just the right way to form life and then evolving, or getting better, also goes against the second law.

I recently got my licenses as well. 2 weeks ago today to be exact. What drew me to it was exactly what others are saying.... the ability to get on the air for relatively little money and talk with others around the world. Not that I've gotten that far yet.

Also working with packet radio, satellites, talking with the IIS... these things really sparked my geek interest like nothing has in a long while. I find it funny that a technology that my grandfather could have been into is still intriguing today.

I've always set the delimiter as this: If they have to reach out and make physical contact then the need either immediate suspicion, or a warrant. By physical contact I mean coming into my house, patting me down or even shooting little microwaves or whatever the TSA scanners do so that they can see under my clothes.

I've had this discussion several times with people at work and this always seems to be the conclusion I come to. Follow me around, listen with parabolic microphones from a distance, even have bomb sniffing dogs sniff the air as I walk by. These are all what I would call passive forms of surveillance. Anything requiring that a person or machine make physical contact with me falls under the right of being secure in my persons, houses, papers, etc. and should require a warrant.

This does not mean that as long as they are not making physical contact that they don't necessarily need a warrant. Only that if they are going to, then they must have one.

I tend to agree. There only a few instances where a GUI needs to be used. My personal belief is that if you can't affectively use a command line, then you are not really a good Admin, regardless of your OS of choice. I've see some pretty cool things done recently on a windows command line that I had no idea could be done.

The options this article talks about aren't missing. You can still do all of these things, it just requires that you actually understand Apache, Postgres, etc. If you don't understand them past what the GUI shows you, then you probably shouldn't be the one responsible for them.

I'm always a bit confused by #4. We've got a pretty good sized object (the moon) in our "region". Would that mean Earth has not cleared its region of planetesimals? Lots of other planets have this same issue. Some of which have much larger moons that Earth does?Serious question here? What am I missing?